


Blood is Thicker

by Flyting



Category: Dredd (2012), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hux Backstory, Hux and Techie are brothers, I like the techienician fics where Hux and Techie are brothers, might make you cry, so I wrote one of those but without the techienician
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-09-06 13:55:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8754655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flyting/pseuds/Flyting
Summary: Separated during the siege of Arkanis, identical twins Armitage and Brendol both assumed the other had died.Thirty years later General Hux finds Clan Techie in a shipment of prisoners.   He settles for standing very still and not making eye contact as the man approaches him, until he snaps, “Look at me,” in a clipped, nasal voice and Techie has no choice. The general has coppery orange hair, like his when it’s clean, slicked back close to his skull. Techie vaguely remembers that his father might have worn his hair that way. The general reminds him of his father, he decides, what little he remembers the man. The same broad military shoulders, the same displeased pout.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I really like all the Kylux and Techienician fics where Hux and Techie are brothers who only recently reunited and Hux looks out for him, so I decided to write one of those but without the Kylux or the Techie/Matt. I think I'm doing this wrong. 8/

Two and a half standard days.

Three-thousand and six hundred and seventeen minutes. Two-hundred seventeen-thousand and twenty seconds. Twenty one. Twenty two. Twenty three. Twenty four.

Numbers tick by in his head, familiar, comforting, like a heartbeat, while his hands twist themselves into idle empty knots. It isn’t much of a distraction, but he knows how to make do. There are nine of them left in a room that is exactly fifteen meters squared. Measurements slot into place with a glance, the sound of his irises clicking reverberating through the hollow parts of his skull. Five meters by three meters with a drab grey ceiling four meters overhead. Everything is grey. The bare walls, the floor, the ceiling. He feels too garish against it. Obvious. He isn’t exactly sure what environment he’s meant to blend in with, all of the too-bright colors of him, yellow and copper and fish-belly white, but it isn’t this. He sticks out like a bruised thumb, however much he tries to disappear into the walls out of sheer force of will.

His hands move invisible wires. He needs something to do with them or he’ll start to panic again, and he’s already picked the sleeves of his shirt to fraying. Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine…

They’ll come for him next, probably. It had been the loud ones first, the ones who shouted and pounded at the walls while he curled into a corner, eyes shut tight, and tried not to exist, but they were all gone now. The twenty men from Peach Trees who had first been herded into this room culled down a few at a time; eighteen to fourteen and now just nine. Everyone huddles along the walls in little clusters, vacant-eyed and numb. It’s just the dregs left, cowards and addicts. Like him, they’ve all reached that zen state of exhaustion where they’re just too tired to be scared anymore.

A little part of him suspects that he was always meant to end up here. It feels like something has come full-circle. Like a code locking into place. He knew it somewhere in his gut when he saw the red and black emblem on their ships. The sounds of blaster fire, the march of armies in white boots and faceless helmets. Of course this was how it would end. That jagged edge inside, where if feels like something was torn away a long time ago and the resulting wound scabbed over but never healed, twinges. It’s a phantom pain, like the ache in his eye sockets no matter how much he rubs.  

 _Close your eyes baby, don’t look. It’ll be okay._ It was his mother’s voice, maybe, although he probably doesn’t remember it right anymore. Sometimes when he is waiting for sleep, curled up in the little nest he had made for himself behind the server banks, he tries to remember her face. She died when he was five.

Time has worn the oldest of his nightmares down to almost nothing, just fear and panic and the all-consuming terror that something was missing, the distant rumble of an explosion, and his mother’s voice soft beside his ear.

There are no beds in the grey room, nothing but a low bench spanning one side, so they sleep on the floor or slumped against the walls. There’s a tap on one wall that will dispense cold, faintly metallic tasting water into cupped hands, but no one has been using it to bathe. The room stinks of fear and other things, but he’s smelled worse.

“What do they want with us?” The clan member who spoke is bruised and skinny, and scratches his arm like a junkie.

Nobody answers.

As the transport they had been forced onto left atmo, he had seen the compound burning through the viewport, oily smoke reaching up into the sky. It should have been pleasing- gods know he’s dreamt about it enough times, furtive and secret like somebody might pry open his head and find out- but it had just made him want to throw up.

After a long moment someone says. “When they take over planets they take children sometimes. To train for their armies, or-“ and he’s surprised to find that it’s him.  
  
He knew about the First Order. Back before the slavers, before his mother died, he had been born on Arkanis. When she asked and he told her, Ma-Ma had called him a _little imperial brat_ and pinched his cheek in her sharp fingers.

“Do we look like fucking children?” a harsh voice interrupts, so he shuts up.

When the door eventually slides open he discovers that there’s still a little fear left in him after all, sloshing around in the pit of his belly. It wells up in shameless little whimpers when the gloved hand of a First Order Stormtrooper closes around his skinny bicep, dragging him to his feet.  
  
“This one?” a modulated voice says.  
  
“Obviously.”  
  
Three-thousand seven hundred and thirty-three minutes since he watched some disinterested Stormtrooper put a blaster bolt through Ma-Ma head. Two point five days of freedom.

“Please, please, please-“

His eyes are closed as he’s manhandled. He isn’t even sure what he’s begging for except that fuck he doesn’t want to die. Not now not like this, anything but like this-

Something sharp pierces the fleshy part of his palm, and the noise that falls out of his mouth is whiny even to his own ears.

He waits, cringed against further pain, but nothing else happens.

When his eyes pop open, a bored Stormtrooper is withdrawing a medical probe, tucking it back into its case. The one holding him upright with a grip on his arm lets go, and he stumbles. They turn their backs on him without a second glance.

The men who had been watching him with something between disgust and morbid curiosity huddle along the wall, hollow-eyed and silent. In two-point-five days this has never happened before. He avoids their eyes.

Once the Stormtroopers are gone he turns his hand over, palm up. A drop of blood wells up from a shallow puncture just below his thumb.

Of course that couldn’t be it. He’s not that lucky. At three-thousand nine-hundred and eighty minutes the door opens again. “Fuck, come on, _please_ ,” he whines, brittle with irritation, when a Stormtrooper drags him up by the scruff of his neck. His hand leaves smears of dirty red on his shirt where he presses his limbs against himself.

Bright light glows against his closed eyelids as he’s marched out. _I didn’t see anything_ he wants to be able to say. _I haven’t seen anything. I won’t say anything._ There’s a low background thud of boots on durasteel. He hates that sound. Normally he has too many other things to be afraid of to worry about the things that used to scare him when he was a little kid, but that sound brings it all back. It reminds him of when he was little. Students marching. Armed police on the street outside their little apartment.

Somewhere in the back of his mind a child’s voice, the one that sounds like his but isn’t, is crying for their mother because sure why not he needs that right now too.

If Ma-Ma was a monster then the First Order was too, just bigger and better organized and why is it always his shitty luck to get trapped in their claws?

A door opens and a blast of chilly air knifes through his thin t-shirt and pants before he’s shoved inside and released.

There were rumors. He spent a lot of time listening to radio transmissions, intercepting garbled status reports. Being a nosy parker passed the time. There were always stories floating around under the radar, on unofficial channels. The First Order had taken over Leshp and scattered the slavers there. The First Order were behind the burning cities on Breydavar. Don’t get on their bad side- the First Order had a torturer who could rip you apart with his mind. His hands are shaking and his insides feel wet and watery, like his bones have been- _ripped out-_ removed and replaced with ice water  
  
“Please, I’ll do anything you want, I’m not with them, just please, please…” the only sound in the room is his own sharp whining. He ran out of dignity years ago. Ma-Ma saw to that.

Fuck knows what the First Order wants from him, but if they’ll just tell him then he’ll give it in a heartbeat. The thought makes him feel guilty, but he has no loyalty to those hollow-eyed men in the grey room.

“Undress and sit on the table.” A droid.

His eyes snap open and the mechanics give a little whir that he feels in his sinuses. The room smells crisp and sterile, like sanispray and bacta and the slightly stale, recycled O2 of a spaceship. He thought they were on a ship but he’s never been on one so big that the walls didn’t rattle with micro-tremors as the engines engaged.

There’s a low exam table and sleek cabinets of equipment. A medical ward.

“If you will not comply security will be contacted.”  
  
“No, no, I-“ he stammers.

Goosebumps prickle over his skin as the cold air hits his bare back. Swallowing hard, he shucks his shirt off over his head and holds it, loosely clenched in his fists, up over his pale stomach. His shoulders hunch as he sits gingerly on the cold exam table.

The droid, bristling with appendages, slides over on smooth wheels. Everything here is sleek and cold, not at all like the muggy chaos of Peach Trees. It makes him feel exposed.

“State your name and age,” the droid says tonelessly, pressing something cold and metal against his ribs.

“Thirty-four, er” the numbers roll easily out of his mouth. The rest is harder. He twists the thin material of his shirt. “They just call me Techie.”

He had a name once. And a mother and a father and a-

But that was a long time ago. Before the First Order, before the refugee camps and the slavers, before Peach Trees.

It was like his baby teeth. He knew that he had them at one point, can even vaguely remember the shape of them if he tries, but they had been gone for so long. It hadn’t been important. Fuck knows where they are now.

The droid seems satisfied with his answer, checking his pulse and scanning his implants and making him stick out his tongue before slipping around behind him. Something brushes aside the greasy hair sticking to the back of his neck and his shoulders creep towards his ears again. There’s a cold feeling and his vision statics painfully for a split-second with interference as it runs some kind of strong electromagnetic sensor over the back of his neck. Almost like it was scanning for something, which was strange, unless…  
  
Clones had electromagnetic data chips implanted in the backs of their necks. The First Order thought he was a clone?

After the exam a pair of Stormtroopers appear just as he’s tugging his shirt back over his head.  
  
“Rise for the general,” one of them barks.

He hops to his feet so fast he nearly slips on the polished floor. That watery feeling in his bones is back, and his eyes jitter, instinctively looking for somewhere to hide. A general was coming to see him? Why? What had he- he hadn’t _done anything_ -

The man who comes in is tall, and younger than he expected, with a deep frown on his face. Techie vaguely recognizes the bands on his sleeve as a rank signature. Was this the general? Was he supposed to salute?

He settles for standing very still and not making eye contact as the man approaches him, until he snaps, “Look at me,” in a clipped, nasal voice and Techie has no choice. The general has coppery orange hair, like his when it’s clean, slicked back close to his skull. Techie vaguely remembers that his father might have worn his hair that way. The general reminds him of his father, he decides, what little he remembers the man. The same broad military shoulders, the same displeased pout. They even have the same accent.

A gloved hand touches his chin lightly, almost gently, tipping his head up. The general stares at him for what seems like an eternity.

“...Bren?” His voice is numb with disbelief. His eyebrows arch. His eyes capture Techie’s attention immediately, if only because they’re the same soft blue-green his used to be, back _before_. He’d always liked his eyes. He’d only looked at his reflection a few times since they put the implants in, hating the deep darkness of them and the way the irises shifted.

Something twinges inside him, in the vicinity of that jagged scab, at the name. _Bren,_ that was short for something. Did he know someone named Bren? Someone they were looking for? He did, he just couldn’t remember, “I don’t- I don’t know what you want…”

The man’s mouth falls open like he’s going to say something, but he pauses. “Bren, it’s Armitage,” he says finally. There is something desperate and sad in his quiet tone, a _you can’t have forgotten_ and _that name_ , Techie will remember that name even when he can’t remember anything else.  
  
_“Armie, no-“ whining when his brother crawled up beside him on the couch, taking over his space, giggling._  
  
_“Go on, Armie,” when his brother hid behind him, scared to pet the neighbor’s loth-cat kits. He was always scared until Techie went first and showed him it was okay._  
  
_“Armie stop, go still,” when his brother wiggled in their shared bed, trying to crawl closer after a nightmare. His mother’s voice, pleading, “Armitage!” when he tried to get away from having his hair brushed and Techie sat still and was good to show him how to be. Making noises at each other in their secret language and laughing at the jokes that nobody else understood. His brother laying his head on Techie’s narrow chest, listening to his heartbeat, and the way it rose and fell as he breathed. His other half, his brother, his twin._

It was his fault his brother had died. Armitage had been so gentle and so timid. It had been Techie’s job to keep him safe.

But he had let those men, _those soldiers,_ drag him away. He had _hidden_ while his twin brother was screaming for him, for their mother, and he hadn’t done anything because he was scared too, because mother had said to stay hidden no matter what but Armie didn’t listen. Techie should have made him listen, should have protected him instead of hiding, but he was just so scared.  
  
“ _Where’s the other one?”_  
  
_“No time, we have to go!”_

And then the ships had come and the sounds of cannons and boots. The ground shook under his feet and mother had held him and told him not to look while the building shuddered and cracked.

Casualties of war, caught in the crossfire between the New Republic and the Empire.

When they cleared away the rubble on Arkanis, there were only a few dozen survivors from his city. None of them were Armitage.

His nose is running, snot dripping down his chin, but he doesn’t cry. He can’t cry anymore. Thinks his tear ducts are probably ruined.

It isn’t. It _can’t be,_ but the man who has his eyes- what used to be his eyes- and his father’s chin, _their father’s chin_ is staring at him with such desperate need. His hand hovers in the air between them like he’s the one afraid. And then Techie freezes on instinct as the man leans forward and ducks his chin, but it is only to lay his head gently on Techie’s chest, one ear pressed over his heart.

Arms loosely encircle him. A hand presses tentatively against his back. The man’s hair smells clean and vaguely like mint from some kind of soap, the astringency of which tickles Techie’s nose.

“Stars, you’re thin,” the general complains, his voice thick.

A little desperately, Techie glances at the two Stormtroopers on either side of the door, whose blank faceplates stare expressionlessly at the sight of their general hugging a pale, nervous prisoner. He can’t think. He feels numb. But the comforting weight on his chest feels _right_ , there’s only ever been one person who’s felt like that- like coming home. His other half.

“…Armie?”

“It’s me, Bren” he whispers into Techie’s chest. “I’m here.”

Techie’s hands shake as he rests them tentatively on his brother’s back. At any moment this is going to be yanked away from him and they’ll say it was all a trick, a lie. He hopes they kill him soon after. He doesn’t want to live in the world where this is a lie. “Armie.”

“ _Bren_.” There will be words later, but right now all he can do is cling, helpless, to his brother _Armitage sweet Armitage who grew up so big and tall_ like he’s going to be ripped away again the second Techie lets go. “It’s alright, I’ve got you. I’ll take care of you, let me take care of you now…”  
  
_Brendol_ , he remembers suddenly. _Bren_ was short for Brendol.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Two Brothers](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14198955) by [WolfAtSea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfAtSea/pseuds/WolfAtSea)




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